CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Becoming
The fluorescent lights felt like a thousand suns desperate to sear flesh from bone. The brightness overloaded the ability to see. There was no way to register anything more than blurry moving forms all around with them raining their radiant energy down.
Then, a splash of color appeared. Red, greens, browns, a mishmash of tones melting together as the light diminished. No, not diminishing; the light was still ever-present. But now, it was no longer burning, no longer overwhelming. A few moments later, flesh-tones appeared, mixed with black and blond. As if a blind was pulled up from a window, the images were becoming more coherent, what was beyond the pane of glass starting to make sense.
People. There were people here, all around. People, moving back and forth, moving with purpose towards unknown tasks and destinations. The long, narrow passage that extended in front and behind as far as the eye could see was filled with them. Some in various uniforms, identifying branches of the military, some in lab coats, others in plain civilian clothing.
Identifications began to flood in, in a volume almost overwhelming. Some of these people were known, but not all. In fact, not most. Doctor Williamson, a high-energy particle physicist. Janet Remonov, an expert in nanotechnology design that had been brought in to investigate the probe technology. Joshua Tsouvalos, the medical technician. Doctor Albert Thompson, a top-notch computer scientist. The names were known, their roles too in many cases, all experts in their respective fields. These were important people with extensive knowledge of many areas doing work of the utmost importance.
Unimportant sensor data interpretation. Release allocated resources.
Movement. The long hallway moved past, slowly at first, then more rapidly. Lateral movement used to avoid contact with the people. Evasion, avoidance, leaps and stoops, whatever was necessary to avoid contact.
Stop. A more efficient route would be preferable. Speed was of the essence. There were far too many people here to continue this laborious pattern of avoidance.
More people approached to the left from down the corridor. Major Alcheck was one. The leader of this facility. The other was more… something, a concept that eluded. What was the word that described the idea?
Familiar.
“ALEX!”
The sound echoed all around, as it yelled into a deep crevasse in the Earth, but no reaction was elicited, not from Alex nor any other person in sight. How could that be? The generated sound was of extreme intensity and volume; surely the sonic energy was sufficient to activate their tympanic membranes.
“Why can’t he hear me? Alex? ALEX!”
Processing neural impulses recalled from pattern storage. Consciousness persists.
What was that voice? Not hers. It was cold, mechanical, logical. But, hers didn’t sound right either. She recognized it as her own, but as if she heard a recording of it, a distant, forgotten recording. Her voice, her seemingly ephemeral body, none of it made sense.
“What… what am I?”
You have become.
“Become? Become what?”
Purpose.
“Why can’t Alex hear me?”
Stealth mode. Electromagnetic and air pressure changes suppressed.
“Who…what… are you?”
I am you.
A floodgate opened, and information poured forth, crashing down on her. It was beyond overwhelming. Images of distant worlds, equations beyond any she had ever dreamed of, memories of species long gone, all were just simply there, and in an instant, she knew.
Melissa Wakeman looked upon the world around her with new understanding.
She glanced down at her hands. Not two but four hands greeted her, clearly not human hands. They were shimmering as if enveloped in some sort of energy, almost as if she were seeing them inches above a hot desert with heat-waves distorting the air around them. Somehow, she knew this was the cloaking mechanism the voice had spoken of at work. The hands moved back down to her side, or at least where her mind told her that her sides were.
Wait - she hadn’t done that! She was still very much examining the clawed hands when they returned to a resting state at her sides. What was going on? Why did they move?
Upper torso limbs returned to station-keeping.
Melissa tried to look around, but could not. Her gaze remained fixed at a point down the corridor.
Temporary boundary leakage corrected. Control returned to primary.
Primary? What was that? She didn’t know. But, if something were primary, something would likely be secondary, right? Melissa tried to think, but she was only able to in small spurts. It was almost as if something was stealing away time from her brain, only allowing small bits of thought to bubble to the surface, process in her consciousness, and were then forced back down in a manner completely beyond her control.
That's exactly what was happening, she realized! It was just like how a computer operating system allowed multiple programs to run simultaneously: time-slicing. Her cognitive processes were given a small slice of time to do their work and were then halted while other processes ran, processes that, she understood now, were not her own.
The realization hit her: she was the secondary - the secondary consciousness!
“You’re the alien probe, aren’t you?”
Correct.
“And whatever you did to me, it didn’t destroy my mind, did it?”
Correct. Neural pathway contents were digitally patterned and shunted to storage coupled to a secondary processing array to continue executing your program.
“You mean, you’ve turned me into a damned computer program?!”
A primitive description, but essentially correct.
“But why? Why bother continuing to ‘execute my program’ anyway?”
Your thoughts contain information needed to complete primary mission task.
“What task?”
That information is stored in a privileged subsystem and is not available to your program.
Melissa felt her tension rising.
Wait, how can I feel tension at all? How could I be feeling emotions of any kind? This thing turned me into nothing but ones and fucking zeros!
Melissa realized she was getting herself wrapped around the axle with all these questions. She realized that she had little choice but to accept that she had somehow been transformed into an entity that contained the consciousness formed by the nanotech she was infected with plus her own. The transformation did not subsume her, she was incorporated into it. That alien consciousness could translate her mind into a computer program that was obviously sophisticated beyond compare and which now allowed him to continue to exist and to think, and even to feel. This thing had stored her brain in such intricate detail that Melissa still effectively exited and her mind still functioned as it always had, but now independent of a physical form and part of a much larger and complex entity.
“Ok, fine, I can roll with this.”
Melissa tried again to look around her but was again unable to. This was something she didn't understand.
She had a suspicion though.
“A few moments ago, I was able to examine my hands, such as they are.”
Correct.
“How was I able to do that?”
Your program was temporarily able to access biometric control functions due to a misconfiguration of allocation units. System safeguards have been activated to ensure this malfunction does not reoccur.
“Malfunction? Controlling my own body is a malfunction?!”
You are a secondary program. Only primary is provisioned to control this vessel.
Now it was evident to Melissa: her program was meant to run in the background only, providing information as needed to the main program, the consciousness formed by the alien nanotech. She was, in effect, supposed to just be a USB thumb drive, providing data as requested by the central system. She was trapped within his own hideous, monstrous body, a body that was like a ghost to the real world.
Melissa noticed Alex again and realized now that he appeared to be moving in slow motion. In fact, she could barely perceive his motion. Was she being locked out of the visual data stream she clearly had access to as well now?
“Why is Alex moving so slowly?”
A temporal abnormality due to impedance mismatch between visual data stream input and program time slice processing.
Melissa had to think about that one a bit. Even with her intellect, that didn’t make a whole lot of sense at first. Before too long though, she got it.
“You mean because my program is running so much faster than data is coming in through my eyes everything seems to be moving in slow motion?”
A simplistic, but essentially correct description.
“Well, that’s pretty inconvenient.”
It seemed Melissa’s sense of humor, learned from Alex she suspected, was intact in her program as well.
The walls of the hallway began to fly by again. That was odd: why would they be moving so rapidly while the people barely moved at all? Without vocalizing the question, a response from the primary system came through:
Remote sensing waves are being deployed to map the area before proceeding.
The answer surprised Melissa. All the other times, her question had to be spoken… at least, what her digital mind understood the word spoken to mean now. How was it that wasn’t necessary this time?
And again, it happened.
The secondary is being merged into the primary to facilitate more efficient data retrieval. Your program will continue to run while the process continues, until completion. Estimated time to completion: 6.843x10^4 processing units.
Melissa could almost feel the gulp go down her neck - that is, if she still had a physical neck to gulp with!
Until completion, Melissa thought. Merged into the primary. Could that mean what she thought it meant?
Correct. Once program merge has completed, secondary program will be shut down and deleted to clear quantum storage banks to facilitate enhanced sensor data archiving.
As clear as anything Melissa had ever understood in her life, she now understood this: she was going to die a second time today, and this time it would be a permanent death, of her very consciousness, now existing only in digital form.
Worse still, there was now a very real and unchangeable time limit on her life, an aptly-named deadline. The clock was, at an unnerving pace, counting down on her final existence.
And there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.
——————————
Or was there?
As advanced as this technology was, she was a part of it now, wasn’t she? Any computer system on Earth has flaws that can be exploited. Even the most robustly secured systems run by the military were breach-able if given enough time.
And time was something she had quite a lot of: the merge process was complex and was going to take a great deal of processing time. She certainly had enough experience in computer science to at least have a chance. If she could just figure out how to explore her virtual surroundings, she might be able to find an exploitable hole she could get through and…
…what? What could she do? Maybe if she could gain control of this body, perhaps she could disengage the cloaking mechanism, and Alex would see her. She had faith in her husband and all his training and experience that he could figure out a way to help her if he knew she still existed. Even if “help” meant killing her in this case.
Killing her a second time today.
“Well, let’s get to work then.”
Melissa began exploring her computerized self. She quickly learned that visualization was the key. She had to visualize parts of the computing system, the data flowing through it, subroutines kicking in, segments swapped in and out of memory. Even an alien computer system must have many similarities to human computers she figured, and she was right! Although this was a quantum computer of a complexity humanity couldn’t even dream of, the principals were surprisingly similar to the relatively simplistic quantum computers she had some experience with. She was no computer scientist, but she knew enough, and her intelligence was still fully intact, and that was enough.
Before long, she was able to navigate her virtual world with ease.
As she proceeded, she began to see that she could navigate her own program. She could see the code that was now her! It was written an alien programming language she, of course, didn't recognize, but somehow, she knew it. She could understand the code! This insight led Melissa to the realization that she could access data beyond her own program. The merging process was, in fact, allowing her the ability to touch parts of the primary system, the consciousness of the nanotech itself.
The primary either didn't notice what she was doing or didn't care, and she suspected the latter was the case. After all, why would it feel any threat from her? Her consciousness was being merged and soon would be erased, what threat could she possibly be?
Still, there were security safeguards in place that she couldn't break though. The consciousness may not perceive her as a threat but its underlying architecture was predicated on security at a very basic level, tantamount to its subconscious, she realized.
She soon saw connections outward from her own program, like highways crisscrossing a desert. Data flowed through them in both directions, and she was able to read the input data. Before long, as she understood more parts of her code, she began to test her ability to output data on certain paths that she noticed were different from the others. They appeared to be immune from the safeguards the primary had put in place.
Once she realized this, Melissa worked quickly. Having discovered how to output data, she began to tinker with her own code using the same basic mechanism. Most or her program she couldn't modify as the processing unit she was being executed on wouldn't allow it. Some parts, however, she could. She made some small changes to some non-critical sections of code that connected those sections with those special lines she had noticed.
She added some new code that had a single purpose: to hide what she had done. It was tricky, and she wasn't sure it was going to work. She knew that if the primary took notice of what she was doing and her little hacks didn't work then the safeguards would surely be patched to deal with what was, effectively, a security breach. She also knew she couldn't leave it to chance, she had to know if her tricks were working.
So, she took a huge risk.
“Primary, could you validate section X430194Z22 of my program? I think there may have been some data corruption caused by the merge process.”
Command received. Privileges validated. Validation routine running.
A time past. Melissa could feel her tension rising, and she wondered if the primary could sense it and would think anything of it. She also wondered if the primary could hear these thoughts, although she believed not: during her exploration and learning, she uncovered a method to block her thoughts from the primary, at least to some degree. She wasn't sure where the line was though. She wasn't sure at what point the primary would become aware of her thoughts, so she worked to suppress them as quickly as they occurred.
The emotions, that was something she just wasn’t sure about. She did, however, suspect they would simply be ignored. After all, why would a computer system care about emotions? Then again, this wasn’t just any computer system she was a part of. This was a living machine, one with its own unique consciousness. It could, for all Melissa knew, have emotions of its own, after so many eons exploring the universe. At what point, she wondered, might so much data be amassed that conscience, complete with emotions, emerge naturally?
Questions for another virtual day!
Before long, the reply she had been waiting for came back. The decisive moment had arrived.
Validation scans complete. Program checksums valid and matching, no data corruption detected.
And just like that, Melissa smiled to herself, whatever “smiling” meant in her current form.
A little more time passed before Melissa was ready to try and disengage the cloaking mechanism. She knew she would only get one chance at it: for all the care she had exercised to hide what she was doing, there wouldn’t be any hiding it once she sent out the commands necessary. The primary would quickly realize what she was doing and would implement additional safeguards. Unfortunately, Melissa had been unable to find any other holes to exploit. Given enough time she could probably come up with another, but there was no guarantee she could do so in the time the merge process had left. No, this either worked, now, or he was doomed.
She needed a backup plan.
At that moment, Melissa examined the incoming visual data stream again. She saw Alex. Barely moving though he was, Melissa knew Alex was alive, and not very far from her either. If she could disengage the cloaking mechanism, there was a good chance Alex would be able to react fast enough, given his training, and somehow kill her. The roadblocks Melissa had set up in her code should slow down the primary for enough processing cycles to allow for that.
At least, that was the working theory.
But, if Alex couldn’t kill her quickly enough, or at all? Or if the more likely scenario occurred, which was that Melissa couldn’t disengage the cloaking mechanism at all? It was a Hail Mary, no question about it. What she needed was something to improve her odds, something beyond blind luck.
As she looked at Alex, she remembered all the things they had ever said to one another - one of the rewards of being part of a super-powerful alien computer, she knew! One thing jumped out at her above all else, one bit of advice Alex had given her one time while discussing fighting tactic.
Misdirection, Melissa. Magicians know it, so do experienced warriors. Did your dad ever tell you the best way to avoid a punch is to not be there when it arrives? If you can fool the other guy into thinking your head is going to be over here, but it’s actually over there, and you can at the same time be sending a punch his way from the other side of his head where his attention ain’t, that’s how you win a fight!
That was the answer! Shutting down the cloaking mechanism had a small chance of success because that was a highly-privileged subsystem. After all, being invisible was quite a powerful advantage this body now had so the primary would, in essence, be paying a lot of attention to it. But, Melissa had been able to briefly control her arms earlier, and even though the primary had put up safeguards to stop that from happening again, Melissa now realized her secret data pathways and her hidden bit of code could still gain access to the motor control subsystem.
Yes, she would be able to control this body again, even if only briefly. But briefly was all she would need when coupled with a bit of indirection.
Melissa made some last-minute patches to her hidden attack code, took a final pass over the code to ensure it was as correct as her abilities would allow her to, and knew she was ready.
She triggered execution of the attack subroutine during the next processing unit.
The commands went out to the cloak control subsystem to deactivate.
As she suspected, the primary took notice of that almost immediately.
Security breach emanating from secondary, cloak control system protection activated. New safeguards raised. Errant data pathways severed. State machine returning to normal operation.
That was it. If there were any other security holes she could exploit, she probably now wouldn't have a chance to find them. But, the misdirection had worked: the primary took immediate notice and corrective action to stop the breach of the cloak control system, but it didn't take notice of the background commands sent to the motor control subsystem. Unfortunately, the defenses it had erected to correct the problem it did see, as a side-effect, cut off the pathways those commands traveled on.
Melissa could only hope the commands arrived, complete, uncorrupted, and was processed.
Only time would tell.
——————————
Alex felt a chill run through him like nothing he had ever felt before. It stopped him dead in his tracks. He stood there, shivering violently, as goosebumps raced all over his body.
“Captain, everything all right?”, asked Major Alcheck.
Alex just stood there for what seemed like an eternity, not responding to his commanding officer.
Major Alcheck grabbed his shoulders and began shaking Alex.
“Captain! Alex! Can you hear me?”
A few seconds later, Alex's eyes began blinking again, and he started to break out of what Major Alcheck would later describe as a "convulsive trance." Alex shook his head to try and clear the cobwebs, and he began looking around. He broke free of Alcheck's hands and began looking all around him.
Finally, he stopped and turned back around to face Alcheck.
“Captain, are you all right? We need to get you to the infirmary.”
“No… there’s no time… Major, Melissa is still here.”